Shakespeare has five turkeys in his works, scattered across the comedies and histories. There are no turkeys in the tragedies, perhaps because it was still rather rare to kill a turkey at Christmas in Shakespeare’s time, and a turkey thus … Continue reading →

Shakespeare was, I’m sure, no grinch, but he does only mention ‘Christmas’ a mere three times, twice in the same play. That play is Love’s Labour’s Lost, and within it, Berowne is the xmas-obsessed character. Near the start of the … Continue reading →

This word only appears once in Shakespeare’s works, but, I feel, nevertheless merits attention. It makes its appearance in the enormous third scene of Richard III, when Richard (currently Duke of Glo[uce]ster) enters a verbal duel with (the former) Queen … Continue reading →

After a slight hiatus, the Word of the Day returns to its favourite, culinary, hunting grounds with a word, drawn from Spanish and Italian, which means “A piece of meat or fish scored across and grilled over coals.” As the … Continue reading →

Nowadays, we use the word qualm to mean a misgiving or pang of conscience, best seen in such phrases as “He had no qualms about taking candy from children”, and so forth. You might suspect a similar meaning in Shakespeare’s … Continue reading →

This is not an article about the famous Victorian author, nor about the four cities in the USA all called Dickens, nor even the World War II battleship, the USS Dickens; rather, I write about a word that appears only … Continue reading →

This is an unusual English word, having undergone a remarkable evolution from its medieval latin roots. It began, according to the OED, as the verb heribergare, meaning to provide lodgings for, and thus, from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries a … Continue reading →

Many of the colleges that make up Cambridge University, founded in more pious times, have religious names: Trinity, St John’s, Peterhouse (as in ‘The House of Saint Peter’, and thus never to be called ‘Peterhouse College’), and others are all … Continue reading →

Crataegus monogyna, or, to give its more usual name, the common hawthorn is fairly common in Shakespeare’s plays. For Henry VI, it even represents the ideal insouciance of the common people that he, as a persecuted king, longs for: Gives … Continue reading →